This isn’t the most timely thing ever, but I finally finished Greg Milner’s big old survey of the history of recording technology, business, and aesthetics, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, which came out last fall.
Great read for anyone interested in recording as an art form, a business, a competition, a VH1 drama, a science, a philosophy, a fetish, or whatever else. There’s a bit of everything in there for you, and while I didn’t really ever feel like he gets around to making a real case for any one specific idea – picking sides in the Loudness Wars, maybe? The tired analog vs. digital debate? — he does flesh out most of these arguments.
The most interesting one, and the one which seems balanced throughout the book (and history), is the idea of audio media as actual record vs. instrument. Are engineers that capture performances as they really sound, with room ambiance and presence and dirt and grit, the true heroes of recording? Or is striving for a realistic, “front-row” experience a joke?
History seems full of audio rivals battling over concepts of fidelity and utility, from the dry-as-a-bone preferences of Thomas Edison taking on the utilitarian gramophone of Emile Berliner. There are dead beat samples and processed vocals on one hand and Tom Waits paying engineers to mic him banging on dressers in a barn on the other. What’s more authentic?
In a way, one of his best observations happens early on in the book and is actually not really followed up too much, enough that I forgot about it until flipping through the intro again.
If Edison could convince you that a Diamond Disc sounds like the way you have decided life sounds, he would own your worldview. He would own you.
Well yeah, it smacks of goofy dorm room manifesto talk, but it’s a central point that underlies everything going on throughout the history of this medium, in a way that doesn’t really exist in films, novels, or painting (though certainly in photography, and probably in TV). Using their own product as the standard for “the way life sounds,” engineers have worked to control the way we hear the rest of the world. It’s similar to the way the lab-created flavors in fast food have come to dictate a lot of people’s ideas of how real food tastes.
Milner trots out examples of “tone tests” that record company salesmen would perform with every recording advance. They consistently fooled people into thinking they were hearing reality broadcast back to them on a 1:1 ratio, pure form. Dummy musicians and singers would start off a performance and, behind the scenes, an engineer would swap in a recording of that performance. The performer would disappear or stop moving their mouth, the sound would keep going, and audiences got their socks knocked off, every time. It happened with CDs, digital tape, electrically recorded records, and wax cylinders. No one could tell the difference.
The thing is, I’m not sure it’s an issue for anyone anymore. Does anyone think they’re hearing the “real thing” when listening to a record? But that mechanism of “truth” is still there – we take music for granted as truth whenever we can. Whether it’s the scrappy ugliness of a lo-fi band like Wavvves, the slick plastic beats of Daft Punk, the kitchen sink feel of a Breeders record – we accept it all as going hand-in-hand with the personality of the music. We don’t want anyone to tell us that things are engineerable at all. We believe that music comes from the heart, that it’s inspiration, that there aren’t people sitting at home with guidebooks and computer programs ready to construct this kind of stuff from blueprints. There are.
Are we worse off for it? Or are we in on it and just don’t care, like pro wrestling fans?
Great tidbits in the book, including the story of Leadbelly and the Lomaxes, who not only manipulated recordings to get them to sound more “real,” but ended up trying to manipulate Leadbelly’s actual performances and mannerisms in order to better fit the idea they conjured in their recordings. A perfect example of Milner’s sentiment above — John Lomax essentially created a mythology around a product that was never exactly there in the first place. He owned listeners’ idea of southern folk singers and he basically took control of Leadbelly’s personality. Leadbelly got it back after years of arguments, but now that we’re here 60 years later, I’d say the final say is back in the hands of the guy that controled the recordings.
There’s also great stuff on King Tubby, Phil Collins, E-MU, and the development of Pro Tools.
PURE DENIZEN 